more rarefied air. There can be no doubt, also,
that light and heat affect, to a certain extent, the
growth of men as of plants. It is said to be a
fact that not only the Peruvians, but the people,
generally, of the colder climates, have larger
heads than those who live in the hot countries.
But, as for the effect of light and heat on stature,
there is so much room for doubt, that flatly opposite
conclusions have been come to on the subject.
Zimmerman has argued from the size of the
Patagonians and of the ancient Germans, that the
highest stature belongs to the colder regions of
the temperate zone, while Blumenbach thinks we
find taller men as we approach the tropics. There
is nothing in either opinion. The short men of
Tierra del Fuego live very near to the tall men of
Patagonia, and the short men of Lapland live
very near to the tall Finns and Swedes. In the
matter of stature, as of colour, descent must be
considered to have far more influence than climate.
Among animals it is found that some grow smaller
in warm, others in cold climates.

But climate appears strongly to affect the rate
of life in men and animals as in plants. Negro
children run about much earlier than European
children. The children of the natives of Nukahiwa
swim alone in the water when they are
scarcely a year old. In Tahiti they often can
swim before they can run. The precocity of the
Zuramatas in Guiana is found also among the
white Creoles in the West Indies, and in the children
born in Brazil. We hear of a negress who had
two hundred descendants about her, and we are
told that among the negroes it is not thought
extraordinary to have a hundred grandchildren.
But this precocity is not due wholly to impulse of
climate. The Jewish girls in Central Europe
become mature much earlier, and age much earlier,
than girls of the people they live among.

There is an unmistakable influence of climate
on the European race settled for some generations
in America. The American, compared with
the Englishman, is lean, though he grows fat
after long sojourn in Europe. The Virginian—
except the West Virginian— is especially tall,
slender, and lean; for, the effect of American
climate is more striking in the central and
southern than in the northern parts, and most so
among the working classes in the plains near the
sea. The New Englander, of the same stock as
the Virginian, is shorter, and usually round-faced.
The genuine Yankee is clearly distinguished from
the Englishman by his sharp angular features
and the excess of breadth between the angles of
his lower jaw, which makes the lower part of the
face square instead of oval. The curly hair of
the European is apt to become straight and stiff
in America, and to grow stiffer and thicker with
each generation. The long neck which usually
accompanies in caricatures the long straight hair
of the Yankee, indicates weaker development of
the glandular system, but there is a great increase
of nervous irritability. Some writers have attributed
this to a predominance of dry west winds,
others to the use of spirits. The voice of the
true Yankee has less metal than that of the
European; his eyelids are said also to be shorter.
It has been said, too, that the beef and mutton
of the United States shows, by defect of flavour
and nutrition, as compared with that of Europe,
the less favourable influence of the climate upon
animal life. In New South Wales the influence
of climate tends to make the children of
Europeans tall and lean, while at the Cape there is
among European colonists a tendency to fat.

Winterbottom asserted that lean people who
are dusky become of a lighter colour upon growing
fat. However that may be, there can be no
doubt that the appearance and character of an
animal will be affected by the degree and
manner of its victualling. When, in the year
sixteen 'thirty-one, Irishmen of Ulster and the
south of Down were driven into the forest by the
English, the poverty of their food in the woods
so altered them, that, being found again at a later
period, they were only five feet two inches high,
big bellied, bandy legged, open mouthed, and had
projecting teeth. So the stunted Bosjesmen are
Hottentots driven by their enemies into a sterile
country, and forced to abide there. When they
fail in the chase, they will eat roots, ants, locusts,
snakes, and lizards; but those of them who live
on the Zuga River, and do not suffer from want,
instead of being stunted brutish men, are strong
and well made. The small and wretched people
of Tierra del Fuego, whose wild rocky coast even
obstructs free exercise of their limbs upon it,
pass the greater part of their lives in huts
or boats, and have legs crooked and thin from
disuse: while, suffering much from cold and
hunger, they are in mind and body dwarfed.
Yet they are apparently of the same race as the
stout Araucanians, their neighbours. In
Australia, too, the lowest types of man are found in
a region deficient in water and wild animals,
where man is miserably fed. But of course that
which is good food in one part of the world may
be bad food in another. The workman in England,
on a damp cold winter's day, thrives on a beefsteak
and a pint of porter, while the workman in
Benguela can maintain his strength on a handful
of Manioc meal, and the Kru negro keeps up his
condition in a life of muscular porter's work upon
a diet wholly vegetable, and which consists chiefly
of rice. The English, in tropical climates, do
not get on so well as the Spaniards and Portuguese,
because they scorn bean fritters, do not
take naturally to a vegetable diet, and persist in
the free use of animal food and spirituous liquors.
The Buraets, and other wandering tribes of
Siberia, are short and weakly through living
wholly on animal food: while the South-Sea
Islanders, who live on fish and vegetables, are
for the most part intellectual and warlike. But,
as a general rule, partly because of the advantage
of bodily exercise in the hunter's case, fisher
tribes are in body and mind poorer than the
tribes that live chiefly on spoils of the chase.
This appears very distinctly in Indians of the
same race living east and west of the Rocky